There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
The Red Gyms of England — a new front for anti-fascism
A new movement of socialist fight-sports clubs is smashing misconceptions that the left is a muddle of middle-class milquetoasts, writes JAMES CROSSLEY
Connecting with the class: 0161 hosts an explosive boxing tournament with fellow left-wing gyms, Manchester, March 2019
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
IT SHOULD not have taken the Brexit vote to show that one of the biggest challenges that the 21st-century organised left faces is its tenuous connection to working-class interests.
The story of why this happened is well known. Attacks on trade unions by Conservative and New Labour governments, and New Labour’s obsession with middle-class swing voters, alienated working classes from socialist movements. New Labour took its traditional base for granted and failed to take seriously the decline of industry and the rise of precarious work.
Labour’s surprising showing in the 2017 election showed signs of a recovery — and this was because Labour began to address economic issues that matter in post-industrial Britain. But achieving power will not be easy. Getting Labour’s message and manifesto past an almost universally hostile media continues to be a difficult task. And socialism can only become rooted if it takes seriously the interests of working-class communities.
More from this author
JAMES CROSSLEY applauds a lucid biography of the German radical preacher who reemerged as a hero in the GDR
JAMES CROSSLEY charts how anti Jewish sentiment developed from ancient days and the dawn of Christianity to the Middle Ages, the birth of Protestantism and the sinister era of of the Nazis
Marxist theologian PROFESSOR JAMES CROSSLEY looks at how the story of the birth of Jesus was created from multiple sources and how the political class use and abuse it today
The peasants’ leader has inspired centures of reformers and revolutionaries since his execution in the Middle Ages following the failed revolt with his vision of an England freed from the Church and aristocracy, writes JAMES CROSSLEY
